Silent racism does more to perpetuate inequality than blatant bigotry

Wednesday, 24 July 2019

A crowd at a Donald Trump rally chants “Send her back! in reference to US congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

OPINION: We need to think about racism in a new way

Donald Trump's recent tweets in which he told four first-term congresswomen of colour to 'go back' to their countries have generated a lot of debate about how to apply the words racist and racism.

The online dictionary, Merriam-Webster, tweeted at the time that the most searched term in its website was racism.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks as, from left, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., listen during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington after Donald Trump's Tweet attacking them.

In my mind there is no doubt the President's tweets were racist. The 'go back' trope is deeply rooted in the history of racism in America and the President's deliberate attempt to resurrect it makes him a blatant racist.

* It's time to make it clear racism is never acceptable

* The short journey home to brokenness and crime**

But racism and racists are not always easy to spot. Most people are well-meaning and do not consider themselves racists, but that does not mean they don't play a role in perpetuating racial inequality and injustice.

The fact is, when it comes to racism, it is not just our intentions and actions that matter - our silence and inaction matter too.

This means racism is not just about hateful actions and words, it is also about inattention to our biases and privileges that perpetuate institutional racism.

For instance, the recent report on 'white flight' from low decile schools in New Zealand shows how the decision of mostly white people not to attend their local school is resulting in the 'ghettoisation of some schools' and lowering of educational outcomes for Maori and Pacific people.

Yes - it is rational for us to want the best education for our children but at the same time, we must recognise that sometimes preserving our own self-interest leads to racial exclusion and inequality and therefore to the perpetuation of racism.

If we are serious about ending racial injustice, we need to accept that we need to think about racism in a new way.

Barbara Trepagnier, in her book Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate The Racial Divide, suggests racism is a matter of degree. 'No-one is literally not racist', she writes.

Trepagnier, in referring to race relations in the United States, explains that all white Americans sit somewhere in the racism continuum. The obvious racists sit closer to the top end of the spectrum while the subtle racists sit near the lower end.

Thinking about racism as a continuum is helpful because the traditional binary categorisation of people as either racist or not racist, while useful for highlighting overt racism, hides silent forms of racism. And yet - according to Trepagnier - silent racism does more to maintain racial inequality than blatant forms of racism.

Silent forms of racism refer to negative thoughts, images and assumptions of other racial and ethnic groups that exist in the minds of well-meaning people who do not see themselves as racist.

For me, nothing illustrates better the silent but penetrative racism that covertly shapes our racial view of the world than the true story told by Jennifer Eberhardt in the opening chapter of her book Biased, Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do.

The story is about the observation Eberhardt's then 5-year-old son made when travelling with her. Excited about being on a plane, the young boy looked around and, pointing to a man, excitedly said: 'Hey, that guy looks like daddy'.

Looking at the man, Eberhardt is surprised to find he looks nothing at all like her husband. But the man, Eberhardt notes, is the only black guy on the plane.

At this point Eberhardt decided she must teach her son that not all black people look alike but before she could say anything, her son added, 'I hope he doesn't rob the plane'.

'What, what did you say?' Eberhardt asked with total disbelief. The 5-year-old was happy to repeat what he had just said.

When asked why he would say such a thing, Eberhardt's son responded that he had no idea why he was thinking or saying what he did.

This story not only demonstrates the incredible power of unbiased racism but perhaps more crucially it shows that all of us - young, old, black, white and everything in between - are affected by unconscious biases.

This type of unconscious bias, Eberhardt says, does not require evil people or bad actors - it just requires 'a person who is out there and absorbing things from the world'.

So how do we counter these subtle but powerful types of racism in well-meaning people?

Eberhardt and Trepagnier both believe that part of countering is noticing.

We need to increase race awareness in well-meaning white people whose silent racism and passivity do more to maintain racial and ethnic inequality than blatant racism does.

This means, while it is important to speak out and show our outrage against overt racists like Donald Trump, it is equally, if not more, important to also pay attention to our own hidden biases and privileges that perpetuate the racial divide.